Ring Road: There’s no place like home. Ian Sansom

demonstrations. A new updated edition of the book, Speedy Bap!!, which is guaranteed a lot of local press coverage and includes all-new chapters on low-fat cottage cheese and wafer-thin ham, is due out soon, with additional recipes gathered from Bob’s visits to various Women’s Institutes, Soroptomists, the Waterstones up in the city, and other local groups and associations.

* Bob’s old friend Terry Wilkinson, ‘Wilkie the Gut’ to many of us here in town – a man who has enjoyed perhaps a touch too much old-fashioned food (cooked the traditional way) in his time – runs a nice little business, The Gist, up on the industrial estate, specialising in vehicle graphics, and he took care of all the graphics on the vans for Bob. Terry left school with no qualifications and few prospects but he now lives in a five-bedroom house with Jacuzzi in the Woodsides development, and frankly a few slips in spelling and the odd wandering apostrophe are hardly going to worry him: as far as Terry is concerned a palette is a palet is a palate; just as long as you get – as Terry himself might say – the gist.

* Unlike a lot of people here in town. Martin Phillips, the solicitor on Sunnyside Terrace, has dealt with more than his fair share of vibration white finger, and asbestos exposure, and occupational asthma, and allergic rhinitis over the past few years – dealing with wheezy old and middle-aged men who spent their lives working on the roads, or on the sites, or on the railways, or out in the fields, or in the factories and the steelworks up in the city, which covers just about everyone here, actually, and all of whom are now seeking recompense for lives diminished and cut short, recompense which usually covers about two weeks in Florida with the grandchildren, a new sunlounger for the patio and a slightly better coffin. For further details and information on claiming for industrial diseases contact your local Citizens Advice Bureau or ring Industrial Diseases Compensation Ltd on 0800 454532.

* Bob’s ‘Sunday Roastie Wedgie’ – cold roast beef, horseradish, English mustard and roasted vegetables in a granary bap – includes just about everything but the gravy (see Speedy Bap!, p.44). He did try experimenting with a cold gravy mayonnaise at one time but the combination of beef stock and whisked eggs was too cloying on the palate. It’s a simple lesson, but one worth repeating: gravy is best served hot.

       3 Jesus, Mary and Joseph

       Introducing the Donellys, God, The Dog With The Kindliest Expression, some memories of cinemas long gone and many other attempted poignancies

      There hasn’t been snow here for Christmas since 1975, which seems like yesterday to some of us, but which is already ancient history to others – around about the time of the Punic Wars, in fact, to many of the children at Central School, for whom modern history begins at the end of the twentieth century and the advent of wide-screen TV and mobile phone text messaging. Gerry Malone, who teaches history at Central – who taught most of us in town our history, in fact – has to be careful not to assume that the students know too much. He cannot assume, for example, that they know anything about the Punic Wars, or that Hitler was a Nazi even, or that mobile phone text messaging was not a means of communication available to Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. Gerry likes to quote Santayana to his students – ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – but he knows that actually it’s the opposite that’s true. Those who can remember the past are condemned to repeat it – again and again and again. It is the history teacher’s burden.

      People have been feverishly praying for snow at Christmas in our town for nearly thirty years, but God seems to have better things to do with His time than to attend to our prayers, although exactly what it is He’s been getting up to recently it’s difficult to see: since writing the Bible, He seems to have been on some kind of extended sabbatical. World peace, for example, does not seem to be too high on His list of priorities and, unless you count the weekly healing services at the People’s Fellowship, His work, at least around our town, seems to have come to an abrupt end.

      Gerry also likes to quote Nietzsche to his students and .he always writes up the name on the whiteboard first – the middle ‘z’ always tends to throw them. ‘Nietzsche,’ he explains, ‘rhymes with teacher.’ And then, ‘God,’ he tells his class, to audible gasps, ‘God, according to Nietzsche’ – and here he always pauses, with an omniscient smile – ‘Is Dead.’

Well. I don’t know. Maybe Gerry’s being too harsh. Maybe someone just needs to text Him, to remind Him that we’re all still here. W T F R U?*

      The sleet and the cold have certainly not slowed up the Donellys, who are old friends and neighbours of the Quinns, and who live up by the ring road and who, like the rest of the town, have been busy making their Christmas preparations.

It’s going to be a very special Christmas for the Donellys this year, snow or no snow – their first Christmas without any of the children, a kind of rite of passage and a relief in many ways, a return to a prelapsarian state, a time long before Mr Donelly’s pot belly and his cardies, and the advent of Mrs Donelly’s flat-soled shoes. This Christmas, if they wanted, Mr and Mrs Donelly could walk around all day naked, barefoot and freed from toil, the pain of childbirth but a distant memory, and freed also from the prying eyes of their offspring, so they could eat turkey sandwiches from morning till night, au naturel, on sliced white bread, with lots of salt and with butter, as God intended them to be.*

      The Donellys’ youngest son, Mark, their baby, lives in America now, where he works for a firm of hypodermic needle incinerator manufacturers. He is married to Molly, has two lovely children, Nathan (five) and Ruth (three), and can’t afford the fare home. Jackie, meanwhile, the Donellys’ daughter, is in north London, a nurse, no boyfriend at the moment and knocking on a bit, but not without her suitors, so Mr and Mrs Donelly aren’t too worried. She is working shifts this Christmas and can’t get back either. Michael – Mickey – still lives in town, obviously, but this year he and Brona are going to her parents’ for Christmas: her parents live in Huddersfield. When Mickey told his parents that he and Brona and the children wouldn’t be around for Christmas Mr and Mrs Donelly both said fine, that’s great, although they didn’t really mean it. Mr and Mrs Donelly get to see their grandchildren all year round, so it’s really only fair to let the other lot have a go, but Christmas is Christmas.

      ‘It’s supposed to be a family time,’ said Mrs Donelly to Mr Donelly. Mr Donelly pointed out that Brona’s family in Huddersfield were family: they were Brona’s family.

      ‘But they’re in Huddersfield,’ insisted Mrs Donelly. ‘It’s not the same.’

      The Donellys’ eldest boy, Tim, is travelling the world. He’s thirty-one and should know better but he’s working in a bar in Sydney at the moment, apparently, Sydney, Australia, if you can imagine that, and the Donellys are expecting a call on Christmas Day. Tim’s said he’s planning a barbie on the beach and a game of mixed volleyball with some workmates for Christmas Day, and Mr Donelly really cannot imagine what that might be like, although Mrs Donelly watches a number of Australian soaps on TV and he’s sat through them with her a couple of times, and he certainly likes the look of the lifestyle over there. It looks a bit more free and easy. More to do outside. No sleet. If he were forty years younger he might even have considered emigrating. But it’s too late for that now.

      Mr Donelly had offered to help his wife with the Christmas shopping this year – the first time ever – and she took him at his word and she gave him a list, and so he was down to Johnny ‘The Boxer’ Mathers, our last greengrocer, the only one remaining, by ten o’clock on Christmas Eve morning, looking for cheap nuts and tangerines, and then he was on to M & S up in Bloom’s after that, cursing Mrs Donelly’s handwriting